Even before the outbreak of violence in the Second Intifada, Israeli governments and American Jewish organizations have pointed to Palestinian textbooks as Exhibit A of the Palestinians’ lack of seriousness about pursuing peace. How can we trust them, the argument goes, if they are inciting violence even among elementary-schoolers with books that fail to include Israel on a map and that glorify suicide bombers?

But a new study, financed by a $500,000 grant from the U.S. State Department and commissioned by the multifaith Council of Religious Institutions in the Holy Land, claims that both sides are to blame for presenting the other as the enemy. While Israeli schools did get slightly better marks for even-handedness and the Israeli school system was praised for its increasing ability to be self-reflective and self-critical, the study undercuts Israel’s often-repeated accusation that “Palestinians teach their children to hate.”

Not surprisingly, Palestinian officials have embraced the results. In a formal statement, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said he had instructed the PA’s Ministry of Education to study the report and implement its findings, updating school curricula to express Palestinian values of “coexistence, tolerance, justice, and human dignity.”

But to the Israeli government, the study—and its overall finding that the Palestinians do not, in fact, incite violence with their textbooks—is tantamount to casus belli. The Education Ministry, run by Likud’s Gideon Saar, has aggressively criticized and dismissed the study. In a written statement, ministry spokeswoman Michal Tzadoky claimed that the conclusions of the “study” (her scare-quotes) were “known in advance, before any professional work was done” and that the research, therefore, “certainly does not accurately reflect reality.” The statement continued: “The Education Ministry chose not to cooperate with those elements who are interested in maliciously slandering the Israeli educational system and the State of Israel.” Appearing on Israeli TV, Strategic Affairs Ministry Director General Yossi Kuperwasser, who monitors Palestinian incitement against Israel for the Israeli government, took it further. The goal of the research, he claimed, “is to weaken the State of Israel.”

Israeli Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, the study’s primary Israeli researcher, has issued a letter to the Israeli Education Ministry threatening to sue for defamation if the ministry doesn’t apologize. “It is the government that is weakening the State of Israel,” Bar-Tal told me over the phone this week. “They [the ministry] are presenting Israel as a country that is anti-democratic, where political officials try to create an atmosphere of fear in order to censor scientific findings. These are the first steps towards totalitarianism. This is very sad.” The ministry’s reaction, Bar-Tal added, has also had a boomerang effect. “The study is scientifically important, but if the ministry had not responded the way they did, the whole world would not be paying attention to it.”

***

Titled “Victims of Our Own Narratives?” the study was conducted by Bar-Tal, of Tel Aviv University, and Palestinian Associate Prof. Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University. According to Bruce E. Wexler, professor emeritus at Yale School of Medicine, who designed the format and managed the research, the study is among the most comprehensive, fact-based investigations ever done of school textbooks. The findings are based on an examination of 74 Israeli textbooks from secular, national religious, and ultra-Orthodox schools and 94 of the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education’s textbooks used in the West Bank and Gaza. Some 3,100 text passages, poems, maps, and illustrations were analyzed in detail.

Characterization of “the other” as “negative” or “very negative” occurred 49 percent of the time in Israeli textbooks and 84 percent of the time in their Palestinian equivalents, the report said. Characterization of “the other” as “the enemy” occurred 75 percent in Israeli books and 81 percent in those of Palestinians. And maps quite literally erase the presence of the other side: Some 96 percent of the maps in Palestinian textbooks do not mention Israel, and some 87 percent of the maps in Israel do not mention Palestine. Although the report did not use the word incitement, it asserts that “dehumanization and demonizing characterization of the other… are rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books.”

The researchers worked with Hebrew-Arabic bilingual research assistants who subjected books from both sides to identical evaluation questions. Data were entered remotely into a database at Yale University, creating the equivalent of a blind study. The research, said Wexler, meets rigorous scientific standards, including high inter-reliability ratings, large samples, and robust findings.

Some Israeli media reported that the State Department had, under pressure from Israel and “American Jewish sources,” rescinded its support for the research. However, in a written statement, Peter Velasco, a State Department spokesman, said that studies such as this “are not U.S. Government policy documents, and are not endorsed by the U.S. Government. …We hope that the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land will use the report in a constructive manner, to pursue their stated mission of advocating for peace and religious tolerance.” The State Department, Velasco said, did not at any point withdraw or threaten to withdraw its funding for the project.

The research was supervised by a 19-member international Scientific Advisory Panel (SAP) the majority of whom endorsed its findings. Several Israeli members of the SAP dissented. According to a memo provided by the Education Ministry spokeswoman, Professor Elihu Richter of the Hebrew University said that “questions remain concerning definitions of the variables, how they are classified and measured and counted and what materials are included and excluded.” Richter warned that some of the comparisons may be “sliding down the slippery slope to moral equivalence.” SAP member Dr. Arnon Groiss, author of a separate study on Middle Eastern textbooks, wrote that he has severe reservations about the methodology and that some 40 significant items, which attest to incitement on the part of Palestinians, were not included.

I spoke this week with Wexler, who was in Jerusalem to present the study. “I am appalled at these ad hominem attacks. I am an American Jew, born in 1947, just after the Holocaust. I certainly do not want to attack the State of Israel,” Wexler told me, his voice nearly breaking with emotion. “Frankly, I think that the minister of education is a great example of the power of unilateral narratives. He just can’t see beyond the blinders in his mind because he is the product of a single national narrative, and he can’t understand or accept the types of things we are talking about here,” he added. “This proves that national leaders who have these kinds of blind spots make for poor and dangerous national leaders.”

***

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Eetta Prince-Gibson, former editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Report, is based in Jerusalem

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Right off the bat, as a layman, I see a major flaw in the survey, and it deals with equivalence.

The author notes that “…maps quite literally erase the presence of
the other side: Some 96 percent of the maps in Palestinian textbooks do not mention Israel
and some 87 percent of the maps in Israel do not mention Palestine.”

Israel is a reality: a member state of the United Nations. When maps in Palestinian textbooks do not mention it–especially when all Palestinians live adjacent to it–that is a far greater incitement than to indict Israel for not mentioning a place that does not yet exist, with boundaries not yet determined

Following your logic Switzerland wasn’t “a reality” untill 2002 when gained full member status in the UN. An obvious absurdity.
Moreover, that an area (e.g. Western Sahara) isn’t recognized as a full fledged state doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be mentioned on a map.
Contested borders also can’t be an objection. Otherwise countries like India, China and Pakistan shouldn’t appear on maps either.

Even if I grant the validity of your arguments, (and I don’t), I refer to the overarching point made by Seth M. Miller, below, and echoed by many of the other commenters:

“Some 96 percent of the maps in Palestinian textbooks do not mention Israel, and
some 87 percent of the maps in Israel do not mention Palestine.”
In other
words, they rigged a study to try to make Israeli textbooks look as bad as
Palestinian textbooks.

I don’t see how I am not referring to that same passage; albeit by critisising your argument as to why it is misleading to equate the (not) showing of Palestine on a map and the (not) showing of Israel on a map. Neither do I see how the study was rigged.

According to government sources, the researchers made selective use
of negative descriptions of the Palestinians in Israeli textbooks. A
senior Israeli official noted that the study overemphasizes the
textbooks used in the ultra-Orthodox private school system, and that
much of the criticism of Israeli textbooks is detached from the
historical context. As examples of the negative portrayal of the
Palestinians, the study cites the 1929 and 1936 riots, and the massacre
of Israeli athletes by PLO terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

“The researchers come out against using the word ‘terrorism’ in the
chapter about the Munich massacre, but nobody can change the fact that
the massacre was perpetrated by a Palestinian terrorist organization,”
the senior official said.

Yosef Kuperwasser, the director general of the Strategic Affairs
Ministry, tracks anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media. He
said the report was particularly scandalous because the researchers
judged Israel and the Palestinians in the same vein. “The whole
comparison is twisted,” he said during the meetings. “We’re not in the
same class as the Palestinians. We’re not even in the same school.”

Out of pure laziness I’m not going to look this up, but what if comparable decisions have been made in the research on Palestinian textbooks? I could also understand some of the decisions they made (depending on the context).

Israeli books don’t put Palestine on the map because editors of those books don’t think that such state exists (as the matter of fact, USA government, including Obama, agrees with them: it doesn’t exist). (look at latest UN voting). Palestinians don’t put Israel on maps because they think that such state doesn’t exist. Who is right? It is up to you to decide.

I think they are both wrong. There are daily interactions between PNA officials and Israeli officials. The decision by either side to omit each other are signs of ideological denial of daily experiences on the ground.

I didn’t say Palestinian state. I said PNA. A very important distinction as you probably would agree with. And as you can see in my first comment I do feel that the fact that a governed area isn’t full fledged state doesn’t necessarily means it shouldn’t be mentioned on a map.

I don’t think you are serious. If the country doesn’t exist and it doesn’t have borders – what are you going to put on the map? There are efforts to declare “green line” to be the border. But it is not the border yet. (right, no?) Should Israeli textbooks define the border of the future Palestinian state according to the desires of the members of EU parliament or mentioned above research panel? I don’t understand.

No, quite the OPPOSITE: Since only one of the two countries is a reality (and one that is running a siege against the other and keeps taking more land), if ISRAEL does this it’s a greater incitement. When a giant screams, it’s decidedly more scary than when a chihuahua barks. Palestine, as you yourself say, a place that doesn’t even have statehood, so no international protection whatsoever, is an international chihuahua. In addition, it is also far more irrational due to the power imbalance of Israelis to behave that way. Reminds me of Black-White race relations stateside, when Whites speak of “the dangers of reverse racism” as if it was a real threat to their vastly more cushy existence and power dynamics.

“The findings are based on an examination of 74 Israeli textbooks from secular, national religious, and ultra-Orthodox schools and 94 of the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Education’s textbooks used in the West Bank and Gaza. Some 3,100 text passages, poems, maps, and illustrations were analyzed in detail”

So we’re starting with apples and oranges — using the more moderate Palestinian faction’s textbooks and comparing them with a hodgepodge of Israeli non-standard textbooks.

Then we STILL find the vast majority of mentions of Jews in Palestinian textbooks are anti-Semitic, while most of our cherry-picked Israeli textbooks don’t mention Arabs negatively:

“Characterization of “the other” as “negative” or “very negative” occurred 49 percent of the time in Israeli textbooks and 84 percent of the time in their Palestinian equivalents, the report said.”

And almost all of the Palestinian textbooks deny the existence of reality, while about a quarter of the (remember! cherry picked!) Israeli textbooks recognize the aspirations of the Palestinian people:

“Some 96 percent of the maps in Palestinian textbooks do not mention Israel, and some 87 percent of the maps in Israel do not mention Palestine.”
In other words, they rigged a study to try to make Israeli textbooks look as bad as Palestinian textbooks. The Palestinian textbooks STILL come off looking worse (though the Israeli textbooks they found are clearly not ideal). And they’re going around telling the press this means that Palestinian textbooks — where 84 percent of the mentions of Jews are not problematic.

I am confused. How does the subhead, “A new study funded by the U.S. undercuts the notion that Palestinian schools incite violence against Israel” square with what’s written in the 7th paragraph, namely:

“Characterization of “the other” as “negative” or “very negative” occurred … 84 percent of the time in their Palestinian equivalents, the report said. Characterization of “the other” as “the enemy” occurred … 81 percent in those of Palestinians. And maps quite literally erase the presence of the other side: Some 96 percent of the maps in Palestinian textbooks do not mention Israel… Although the report did not use the word incitement, it asserts that “dehumanization and demonizing characterization of the other… are rare in both Israeli and Palestinian books.” [I’ve elided the parts referring to Israel for brevity.”

Even though the report declines to characterize these findings as incitement, they clearly fall under that category using any reasonable definition of the word.

It seems that Ms. Prince-Gibson just saw what she wanted to see, or at least the headline writer did.

Equivalence, statistics which are based on subjective readings of phrases which appear in different languages and nothing about how Islam can create people willing to commit suicide in its cause which is a substantial difference between Islamists and even other terrorists. Yeah, and Yale has some supreme ability to come up with a means of judging not one but two different peoples.
Great Job!! Not.

Who was selected to conduct the analysis of Israeli textbooks? Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal. Unbiased and objective? Hardly. About Operation Cast Lead, he said that the war was: “derived from the continuous dehumanization of the Hamas organization.”

In fact he is on record as claiming that “most Israeli Jews do not know that Hamas was originally founded by the Israeli authorities.”

Wow. I think it’s fair to say he went into this task with a preconceived notion about the outcome.

The anti-Israel bias in the “study” is vividly demostrated by the way it deals with Palestinian terror. It compares the way the Palestinians honor suicide bombers to the way Israeli shcools honor the memory of Josef Trumpeldor, who was fatally wounded while defending his village from Arab attackers in 1920. Prior to his death he said: “It is good to die for one’s country.” This is very simulat to the way US students are taught about Nathan Hale, who told the British in 1776: “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” The children are also taught about Patrick Henry, who said in 1775: “Give me liberty or give me death”
Is it possible to compare that to suicide bombers who deliberately sacrifice their life in order to kill innocents?

Well researched and worded. It strikes me how blind most of us prefer to be vis-a-vis the inconceivable destruction and evil we as a occupying power impose and create upon innocent’s heads. Look people at http://www.zochrot.org. There have been more than 400 villages wiped off the map in 1948. The inception of the state was violence filled. The occupation is about wanting all the land on which indigeneous people have lived for thousands of years. Injustice and the lack of social justice as wanton hatred also have been the main reason for our already more than 2000 years of exile. What have we learned if we are not willing to scrutinize our own not so beautiful role in this whole conflict instead of gulping down propaganda and seeing ourselves mainly as the victims of …(take your pick). Wake up, inform yourself and then act or be ashamed. The truth is rather different and very disturbing. http://www.btselem.org, http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il

This article is a pure propaganda. In the beginning of it the author claims that before 2001 (“before the outbreak of the second intifada”) Israel criticized Palestinian textbooks for inciting violence. However, author states, this is not true since the “new study blames both sides”. In other words the author tries to present the issue in such a way as if the “new study” was done on the same old books (prior to 2001) and not on the new ones and thus implicate Israel of baseless accusations. This is a well-known trick from the Goebbels arsenal.

Read the first paragraph: “Even before the outbreak of violence in the Second Intifada…have pointed to Palestinian textbooks as Exhibit A of the Palestinians’ lack of seriousness about pursuing peace… ” And now the first sentence in the second: “But a new study.. claims that both sides are to blame”. It makes an impression that this sentences references to the textbooks in Pal’s schools before 2001 (first paragraph) suggesting that Israeli blames were wrong and baseless. However, the study was done on the books issued 10 years later and not the ones Israel criticized.

A bigger problem on the horizon……..The anti-christ will arise somewhere in the middle east………his calling card is he will attack Israel, and persecute christians to the death………He will lead a confedarcy of 10 nations the bible says………Ahmadinejad also proposed forming a new group of 10 or 11 countries to work to end the 18-month Syrian civil war.

Revelation 17:12-14………. 12 “The ten horns which you saw are ten kings who have received no kingdom as yet, but they receive authority for one hour as kings with the beast. 13 These are of one mind, and they will give their power and authority to the beast……….

Psalm 55:21……..
The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, But war was in his heart; His words were softer than oil, Yet they were drawn swords.

Actually we’re on the side of Christians, Druse and islamic minorities which are suffering under current conditions. People like you love equivalence in democracies and engagement with tyrants. That is the way of blood.

“Nurit Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli academic, mother and political radical, summons up an image of rows of Jewish schoolchildren, bent over their books, learning about their neighbours, the Palestinians.”

Political radical? Perhaps her preconcieved opinions influence her analysis?

While it is never OK to label someone a self-hating Jew for being critical of the political state of Israel–as appears to have been the case with comments directed at the study’s author–this article and the presentation of the study is very confusing.

I haven’t read the study, but the statistics cited in the article contradict the headline. There needs to be some clarity here. Is the author (either of the article or the study) distinguishing between “negative” connotations towards the “other” and “inciteful” connotations towards the “other”? If so, that is a counter-intuitive finding that needs to be explained by Tablet.

What do you expect? Arabists at the State department would sponsor a “study” supporting the truth about Palestinian text books? Come on! You know better than that!

I saw a text in Gaza in 1956 with hooked nose Jews with the question: You 5 Jews and you 2. How many Jews are left. P_robably the text books are more sofisticated today but their aim is the still the same. It explains young men in the dead of night slaughetering a Jewish family including a baby in his crib with his throat sliced.What do you expect? Arabists at the State department would sponsor a “study” supporting the truth about Palestinian text books? Come on! You know better than that!

I saw a text in Gaza in 1956 with hooked nose Jews with the question: You 5 Jews and you 2. How many Jews are left. Probably the text books are more sophisticated today but their aim is the still the same. It explains young men in the dead of night slaughtering a Jewish family including a baby in his crib with his throat sliced.

Leaving the “study” about textbooks aside, it’s beyond debatable that other avenues of influence play a role in shaping children’s minds. And on that score, one need not look far to find Palestinian children’s television shows filled with anti-semitism and calls to martyrdom.

First and foremost:
Kahanist Moshe Feiglin elected to the Knesset on the Likud ticket last month. Feiglin in a 2004 interview with Jeff Goldberg of the New Yorker:
“Why should non-Jews have a say in the policy of a Jewish state?” Feiglin said to me. “For two thousand years, Jews dreamed of a Jewish state, not a democratic state. Democracy should serve the values of the state, not destroy them.” In any case, Feiglin said, “You can’t teach a monkey to speak and you can’t teach an Arab to be democratic. You’re dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. Muhammad, their prophet, was a robber and a killer and a liar. The Arab destroys everything he touches.”http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact2_a?currentPage=4
See also, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1045106.html

He advocates revoking the citizenship of Israel’s Arab minority and ethnically cleansing all Arabs from all of israel, including “Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

3, Number of buildings permits granted to Jews in Jerusalem (2008): 13,941 (about 20% in Arab neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem). Number of building permits granted to East Jerusalem Arabs (to build in Arab neighborhoods only, of course): 400 units.

A-Speeches by political leaders invoking racism:
From Binyamin Netanyahu’s 2003 speech to the Herzliya Conference,
while he was the Finance Minister: “We have a demographic problem, but it
is focused not on the Arabs of Palestine but on the Arabs of Israel.” He
explained: “If the Arab residents become wonderfully integrated and their
numbers reach 35 percent to 40 percent of the total population, the Jewish
state will be canceled out and become a bi-national state. If their number
remains around 20 percent as it is today, or even declines, but relations are
harsh and contentious, then, too, the democratic fabric of our argument will be
impaired.”

C-Religious Incitement Against Arabs By Israeli Rabbis:
The King’s Torah —
Rabbi Yitzak Shapira’s new Halachic commentary, “The
King’s Torah” [“Torah Hamelech”]. It’s a guide to killing gentiles (a/k/a, Arabs).
A few quotes will suffice from the chapter titled “The
Killing of Gentiles in Wartime”:
“In any circumstances where the presence of a gentile causes
danger to Israel, it is permitted to kill the gentile.” (Wow, mere “presence” is enough! Kill all 100 million Arabs?)

“In cases where there is strong suspicion that someone will
continue persecuting Jews, it is permissible to kill him, even if at this
moment, he is not actively persecuting.”
(Merely being a Palestinian is enough.)

and the best one:

“There is justification for killing babies if it is clear
they will grow up to harm us.”

And don’t forget this gem: “when we come upon a non-Jew
who is not keeping the seven [Noahide] laws, and we kill him out of concern for
the keeping of the seven laws, it is not prohibited.” (It’s OK to kill any
gentile.)

Shapira’s book also calls for destroying the Al Aqsa mosque.

And no, this is not a “fringe” book. It has been embraced by many prominent Rabbis including the son of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, leader of Israel’s Shas party. It is now taught in many West Bank yeshivas.

From Haaretz: “In 2006-2007, the Israeli Ministry of Education gave about a quarter of a million dollars to [Shapira’s] yeshiva, and in 2007-2008 the yeshiva received about $28,000 from the American nonprofit Central Fund of Israel.”

“Prominent religious figures wrote letters of endorsement that preface the book. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef, son of former Sephardic Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, blessed the authors and wrote that many “disciples of Torah are unfamiliar with these laws.” The elder Yosef has not commented on his son’s statement.

Prominent Rabbi and Leader of Israel’s Fourth Largest Political Party Says Palestinians “Must Die”:

“Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this
world,” Rabbi Ovadia was quoted as saying during his weekly sermon at a
synagogue near his Jerusalem home. “God should strike them with a plague,
them and these Palestinians.”

Dear Mr. Toren: Moshe Feiglin has the guts to proudly proclaim he is an admirer and follower of Kahane. He knows that will not play well in the U.S. and Europe. He does not give a damn what the goyim think.

It ought to be noted: The influence on the young among the Arabs comes first and foremost from the home, then from the TV images, from the preachers at the mosque and only then from school.

Sadly, we keep hearing and seeing Muslim-Arab leaders spewing the hate of Jews from every possible street corner along with every town square and mosque. Arab TV are loaded with conspiracy theories about the Jews who are eager to take control over the world – in the form of the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – which are echoed by political and religious figures and by heads of clans and family. The message is clear: There is no justification for Israel’s existence on ANY parcel of land of what we, Jews, consider the Jewish ancestral homeland.

Any attempt to hide from this ugly reality in the form of “studies” amount to a spit in the face of intellectual honesty.

This is typical Israeli modus operandi, repeated time after time: Don’t cooperate with the study allegedly because the results are “pre-determined”; object to the findings made by an unbiased, reputable, indeed esteemed group; plead discrimination and thus make a cause celebre out of the study, giving it wider attention than it would otherwise receive; condemn the group that conducted the study. The final part of this ad nauseam scenario will be to accuse the examiners of being anti-Semitic and/or self-hating Jews. Ho hum. Another day in Israeli politics.

Evidently there was no room to print any background information on Prof Daniel Bar Tal and therefore the author of this blim blam decide it wasn’t improtant. For those interested here is a wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Bar-Tal. For those really interested, they should look at Bar-Tal’s prior work and see that the good prof has very set opinions about the Israeli-Arab conflict and the results of the “study” is just double down.

Everyone is entitlted to his opinion and I dearly hope the good prof does try to sue the State of Israel and that he should loose grandly. The State of Israel isn’t and can’t make Prof Bar Tal come to any conclusions than his own. Unfortunately, neither can the facts.

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